Unidentified Analyst
Appearances
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Coming Soon - To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
I think it's the greatest transfer of wealth in history.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Coming Soon - To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
They said publicly that the reason for these hacks was in order to disable our critical infrastructure. You don't hack infrastructure for fun. It's reconnaissance.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
a commentary on the overall weight loss market. I think there's a fear of saturation. There was a survey that came out recently that said one out of five Americans have tried GLP-1. So we're sort of getting to the point where people who want it are already using it. And so there's a question of where the next growth is coming from.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
And then in terms of what's in the pipeline, there's been some underwhelming trial results lately. So there's not something on the horizon, the next great weight loss drug from these companies meant to take it over.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
So I think in the sort of selling spirit that gripped the markets in general earlier this week, I think people in those stocks took the opportunity to sort of take profits, dump their position and look for other opportunities elsewhere.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
So Novo Nordisk, I don't know the drug off the top of my head, but it hit its primary endpoint, but it was less than people had expected in terms of the efficacy for the drug. This is sort of the next generation of their weight loss drug program. This came after another disappointing trial on the same drug earlier.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
So there's just sort of a feeling that while this drug is performing competently, it's not a game changer on the market. So it's just going to be another kind of weight loss drug on a market. And so it might have some benefit for some users, but isn't going to open up the market the way people had once hoped.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
So all those have the similarity that they're consumer focused stocks. So I do think that worry of a recession is just sort of eroding general sentiment for consumer stocks. Tesla obviously has been a major story, will remain a major story as we go forward. Elon Musk in his Doge role has really
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
Put a spotlight on the company in a way that's become a difficult brand management situation, to say the least, for the rest of the people at Tesla while he does his trip to Washington, his step away from Tesla leadership to be part of the Trump administration. So people are starting to get antsy, bulls in Tesla, people who have been kind of by the dip people so far this year.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
So for instance, Dan Ives, who's a big bull on Tesla, he's from Web Bush. He called this a moment of truth and he called on Musk to step up as Tesla CEO to basically get back in the chair and start taking steps to improve the company's brand. It's been facing... protests and they've tried to push back. There was that sort of car show on the White House lawn that took place recently.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
So as you mentioned, the markets were down pretty sharply on Monday and continued to drift lower later in the week. So it was definitely a down week for the market. When we're looking at it, I think it's important to kind of pick out outliers and stocks that maybe buck the trend a little bit.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
So it's just become a weird situation around Tesla. So I don't know if we can look at Tesla as a sort of market proxy at all, just because the headlines around it have made it just a bigger story. then Wall Street. You mentioned Starbucks. I think that's an interesting one because Starbucks was actually down before the major market shifts. It's been down seven of the last eight sessions.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
It had reached a 52-week high early last week, but then the CEO came out with rather harsh comments sort of message to workers. There were layoffs recently and the CEO said that the company had not been effective and he called on workers to work harder after the round of layoffs. He also called for leadership culture change, focus on accountability.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
And I think it was jarring for shareholders because the stock had done well so far recently. And the comments from the CEO, I think were interpreted and is somewhat of a panic mode. Like we need to change, we're in trouble. And I think that that spooked a lot of shareholders. General feeling is that he's trying to just put a stamp on the company.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
It's been kind of bouncing around for a number of years now. If you look at a chart, it's basically sideways for the last several years. Even reaching a 52-week high is just sort of getting back some losses that it had previously. So I think the idea isn't necessarily in the near term we need to make these changes.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
It's more that we need to make these changes to break out of the doldrums that we've been in for a while now. There's been a lot of sort of leadership shuffle at Starbucks over the last few years. So I think it's just sort of planting the flag, saying I'm in charge now and kind of pointing a direction forward.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
I think that's an interesting point because I think we're coming off of an era of celebrity CEOs. Elon Musk is sort of a legacy one, obviously. But a lot of companies have kind of gone in a more generic way for their leadership. I'm thinking, I mean, Tim Cook, everybody knows his name because he's head of Apple.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
But if you compare him to Steve Jobs, just sort of the personality profile he has in the culture, I mean, I don't expect a Walter Isaacson profile.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
um biography of tim cook to come out anytime soon and so you might be right is part of it is just sort of getting in the public eye and creating a brand around starbucks that that has a personality to it that has a name to it that has a face of the company and uh moving away from the sort of more generic leadership that some companies have had after their founders have moved away i mean amazon's another
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
If you go to the kind of winners and losers leaderboards for the week, there's just a lot of red and a lot of stocks that are down sort of similar amounts. It's kind of hard to pick out. ones to focus on. So if we're looking for some green and a big wash of red, you can look at some big oil players. So ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil were both up over the past week.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
Good example with Bezos stepping away from the CEO role, it becomes a much less high profile position. It's more of a manager position and less of a kind of celebrity CEO situation.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
So the Fed decision's out Wednesday. That's going to be the big market mover. Currently, there's a 99% chance, the markets are pricing in a 99% chance that rates are going to hold steady next week. So that's basically in the can. There's not really much to debate there. But
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
The most interesting thing is going to be the commentary, especially Fed Chair Powell's remarks afterwards, the press conference that follows. See if there's anything off the cuff, especially related to the chances of a recession and the Fed's, how it feels like it can get out of the bind it's in. It's kind of been squeezed now with... weakening economy and sticky inflation.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
There's sort of a mini stagflation situation that we've talked about. And so does he have a vision for how to sort of wiggle out of that? On the corporate side, there's not a lot of earnings coming out, but there are some interesting ones to look at. So there's a couple of Chinese EV makers. The biggest one to look at is Xpeng. It was up earlier this week. It was up 15% on Tuesday after it
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
talked about mass producing flying cars and humanoid robots. So it's really taking a Tesla-like approach to its future, where it's sort of making big promises about technology that isn't really related to its core electric car business. There's been a narrative that's been growing in, I'd say, past year, 18 months about the smaller EV makers, especially the ones coming out of China,
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
competing, starting to catch up to the more legacy carriers. I'm including Tesla there too, but also the EV programs at places like Ford and Toyota. When we get earnings from Xpeng next week, and also NIO is reporting, those will be interesting kind of data points on that scale, especially if you're looking at Tesla, that might be interesting to see what market share is.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
situation is with those companies. I really don't think that in two months time, they're going to completely revolutionize the market though. There was the data point recently that Tesla's EV sales had fallen. I don't remember the exact number, but some large amount in Europe
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
Recently, even as overall EV sales have gone up, so that's clearly just a market share loss in Europe as a political reaction. It might be happening faster than we'd expect where some other places can kind of find room to get a foothold as people turn away from Tesla. FedEx is reporting next week. It's a good kind of economy proxy.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
So if you're looking for some data about the economy in an otherwise relatively empty week for economic data, the FedEx earnings might be worth a glance. Their freight business especially has shown some weakness lately. So that's a good measure of sort of B2B activity. Companies like, are they shipping things? So you can look at that. And then Micron is reporting next week.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
It's kind of an interesting case in sort of the chip tech world. It's up 10%. 1% in the past week, so it's held up well while the rest of tech stocks have fallen. It's also up 4% in the past month if you compare that to the S&P 500, which is down 9%, and NVIDIA, which is down 12%. However, overall, it's kind of struggled to capture the AI imagination. So it's down 2% in the past year.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
ConocoPhillips is up 10%, ExxonMobil up 4%. They were both up as the markets fell on Monday. I think this is just sort of a seeking shelter kind of play. Overall, the stocks have been tracking oil prices over the past year and are actually down over the course of a year, underperforming the major averages. But now both stocks are beating the S&P 500 for year to date. So
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
Meanwhile, NVIDIA is up 26%. I'm just using NVIDIA as sort of a benchmark for sort of interest in tech generally. So Micron has been sort of left out of what some people might be calling a bubble. So its earnings will be sort of interesting. It's already sort of holding up well when other stocks are pulling back. So Micron might be seen as sort of a safe haven within tech
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
for people who are kind of running from the stocks who had already run up. Thinking about it in terms of Intel naming a new CEO this week, and I just think there's a set of companies that have been kind of on the outside looking in in the recent kind of run up in the tech space. And like we were talking about in Tesla, the
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
Conditions can change pretty quickly and companies can stumble and other companies can kind of pick up the mantle when that happens. So you might be seeing sort of a similar thing in the chip space as NVIDIA's growth slows. You get sort of an early mover advantage if you're somebody like NVIDIA and you capture a lot of that early growth.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
early growth, the AI space, but then the competition eventually catches up. I mean, we've seen this with OpenAI and ChatGPT in general. Now there's a lot of competing AI platforms that people are using. So I think NVIDIA is... pretty well situated just in terms of having already gotten that business and already positioned itself as kind of the go-to place.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
But obviously NVIDIA is also going to have capacity limitations. It can't fill every order it gets necessarily. So they've been talking about $2 trillion in sort of AI infrastructure build out in the relatively near term, and that's not all going to go to Nvidia.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
So I do think there's room for these companies that kind of languish a little bit or like an Intel's case fell behind enough that they're really seriously needing a turnaround to bring it back. But it's certainly possible. There's certainly a market out there for it. And so if leadership can kind of steer things
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
enough steer into the skid to capture the capacity, the demand that's not being fulfilled by the people who've already stepped up.
Wall Street Breakfast
Amid market turmoil; compelling earnings coming
they've kind of jumped past the S&P 500. So I think that's just a sign that people are looking for safe havens in an overall dangerous market. And then we look at the other side, some of the unexpected leaders on the downside so far this week have been the weight loss drug makers. So Novo Nordisk is down 18% over the past week and Eli Lilly is down 12%. I think this is sort of a